CRM = Can’t Really Manage?

Freelance voice actors should ALWAYS be prospecting; at least when they’re not busy servicing their regular customers.

For a good many modern marketing mavens, that means building email lists. Lists that you can use to reach out to people that might hire you. Lists that explain who the contact is, where you met them, when’s the last time you approached them, what happened in that encounter. What school they want to. How many kids they have. What kind of pizza they like. You know…important stuff.

Organizing all those contacts & info into something that is usable, makes sense, and is easy to keep track of can be a challenge.

That’s where CRM’s came into being. The internet made it easy (kinda – see my caveat below). And there are a gazillion Customer Relationship Management tools and software packages. Some free, some quite costly.

I’ve tried a number myself, Batchbook, Cloze, Nimble, ZohoCRM to name a few. But these companies keep coming and going. New players enter the scene, and updates/upgrades can really change the product.

CAVEAT

Ultimately, I found myself spending too much time learning, configuring, and customizing the software itself, and never found it helped me manage my clients. I’ll admit to being a geek about this stuff. I always tell people I never play computer games, because to me, the computer IS the game.

Others tell me they do just fine with Excel as a tool to organize this information.

Like anything else online these days, ya gotta stay with the flow and find what works best for you.

In that spirit, let me link you to a pretty nice comparison tool I found from Zapier. Zapier is a rich-man’s IFTTT. But they have newsletter with great tips once in a while.

This is the about the most complete rundown of available CRM’s that I’ve seen lately. They’re all free, but most of them have upgrade pricing, depending on your needs.